Guide to compile CalculiX

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[Last updated: 26 March 2021]

Hello!

CalculiX is a powerful tool for FEM purposes and is used by many open source software for this very purpose. However, a newcomer can be deterred by the troubles one can face while compiling CalculiX for their distro. The compiled binary available on the website doesn’t work on Fedora 33.

The following steps were performed on a system with AMD CPU, Nvidia GPU with Nvidia proprietary drivers. The steps here are for the complete source downloaded from here (cgx_2.17.1.all.tar.bz2).

  1. Start by reading install guide
  2. When you run make then your installation will throw an error that a header or any other file cannot be found. Copy the file name.
  3. Paste the file name in the search option here. Select Provides tab. This will show you list of packages that provide this particular file.
  4. Install the package and proceed with step 2. Keep doing this until the build process is complete.

Here are the packages that I had to install on Fedora 33 libXmu-devel libXi-devel mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel

I was unable to compile the program available here(ccx_2.17.src.tar.bz2). It kept throwing errors related to ARPACK which was compiled in /usr/local/ARPACK. If someone has compiled just the source then please extend this guide.

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Could you share the errors related to ARPACK?

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During the build process, libarpack_$(PLAT).a couldn’t be found. So, I rebuilt it from scratch. After this I was able to compile ccx_2.17 .

If you are interested in the exact error then this comment summarizes it.

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Hi, the documentation of the CalculiX adapter for the preCICE Coupling library explains how to install dependencies and build CalculiX from source.
You can omit the adapter-specific parts and simply run make inside the src folder to build ccx.

We are continuously improving the wiki, so the page may change in the future. Of course constructive feedback is always welcome.

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